Introducing the new Macleans.ca: improved and redesigned to deliver on multiple platforms the rich experience that makes Maclean’s Canada’s most read, most indispensable source of news, opinion and analysis.

We overhauled our design—with easier navigation, a cleaner look and bigger photographs—to improve your reading experience in a digital world, whether on a desktop monitor, laptop, tablet or phone. However you want to join in the national conversation, we are ready where you are.

What’s not new is our dedication to delivering essential reading on the stories at home and around the world that matter to Canadians. It’s the award-winning work Maclean’s has done for more than 109 years. It’s a job we take seriously.

From the bold images on the home page to the distinctive author pages, we have also reorganized to better showcase the work that we do best.

The new Macleans.ca brings you face to face with our authors. Blog Central is gone, replaced by a drop-down author menu where you will find all your favourite Maclean’s voices—yes, even the ones you love to hate. (More on reader comments in a minute.)

The section menu directs you to the latest news, opinion and analysis, plus engaging writing on arts, culture, education, society, and the way we live now.

Maclean’s Politics remains your home for thought-provoking analysis from Ottawa, Washington and abroad. We’re also there live when news is unfolding. When Parliament is in session, QP Live brings political theatre to your screen with rolling commentary. Maclean’s on the Hill, our weekly podcast, serves up frank talk and analysis about the news that matters. Led by the award-winning writers in our Ottawa bureau, Macleans.ca is the essential destination for anyone who cares about politics in Canada.

In our Economy hub, you’ll find business coverage led by Maclean’s business editor Jason Kirby and the latest thinking from Canada’s leading economists: Stephen Gordon, Andrew Leach, Kevin Milligan and Michael Moffatt.

We’ve reorganized our On Campus coverage to better serve today’s high school, university and college students—before, during and after graduation. In addition to our new Education section, we’ve added one devoted to Work, a go-to source for the latest on employment trends.

Above all else, we wanted our thought-provokers and opinion-makers to be front and centre. We want you to engage.

The new design comes with a new comment platform. While we’ve managed to migrate the majority of comments from the old site to the new, we weren’t able to preserve old usernames and login information. To continue commenting on the site, please create a new account by following the instructions below.

To create a new account:

To create your Macleans.ca account, click here to access the ‘sign-up’ link. You can also find it by looking in the top-right corner of your screen. Mobile users can tap the menu icon at top left. The ‘sign-up’ link will appear above it.

To log in with an existing account:

Once you’ve created your account, you can sign in by clicking here. This link can also be accessed by clicking ‘Sign-in’ in the top right corner of your screen, or by following the mobile instructions outlined above, and tapping ‘sign-in.’

Like most new designs, this is a work in progress. We’ll be improving and refining as we go. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Hi Dave – Appreciate the feedback, and will make note of all of it. As mentioned, this is a work in progress. To explain a little further: the goal of merging Blog Central content with the rest of the site was to create clearer hubs for our individual authors — a single place where all of a writer’s work would live, rather than having it exist in different silos around the site. The authors you followed on Blog Central can all be found in the Authors section – the latest posts by each author will appear at the top of their own author page. We’ll also be promoting all the latest work on our main page. The old links should all be redirecting on Google, but if there’s a specific one that’s not working, please flag it for us so we can fix!

As a longtime reader of Blog Central (and a print subscriber) let me also mourn the loss of a magazine blogroll. If it’s good enough for THE ECONOMIST, why isn’t it good enough for MACLEAN’S? The attraction of Blog Central was the randomness of it; I’d get to see posts on subjects or by writers I might not have considered.

You’ve created ANOTHER set of silos: I like Wells, so I read his stuff. Period. I don’t discover, e.g., Cosh or Wherry or …

Really too much in-your-face. The big fonts looks like you’re shouting, and I think the old layout was more intuitive. It certainly was more elegant in appearance. This just looks cheap, like a tabloid.

And the commenting isn’t Disqus, which while far from perfect, was at least popular and widely used. I don’t really need another account & password added to my already too-big list.

I guess I’ll go back to reading the paper magazine, and if I wan’t to comment, I’ll buy a postage stamp.

Thanks for the feedback, John. Can you clarify which big fonts you mean – all of them? Headlines? (Also, if you don’t mind, could you let us know what browser you’re using? That kind of info helps us track any potential bugs that may need fixing.)

Using Google Chrome on a 17-inch laptop (at the moment), and the fonts in the comments section look to be a reasonable size, though surrounded by vast areas of white space. The other sections (e.g, the actual stories) are in some sort of enormous size that I can literally read from across the room (I checked). It really dose seem like the news stories are yelling at me.

You have co-opted the previous design to make a sight that looks good on a playbook. It looks terrible on a desktop screen. Too much white space, too much scrolling. The comments section is the worse. Size 20 font for articles, size 8 font for comments, way too much gap between comments. Go back to discus, it actually worked. You’ve now gone to being a website with one of, if not the worse comments sections.

Thanks, Selena. When you mention the white space and scrolling, do you mean on the front page, or in the story itself? Also, could you let us know what browser you’re using? We’ve made note of your feedback on the comments, both in terms of text size and function.

Thanks, Selena. Could you possibly email us a screen capture so that we can investigate further? lindsey (dot) wiebe (at) macleans (dot) rogers (dot) com. It’s hard to visualize without seeing it myself, but it sounds like there may be some scaling issues at play.

Not liking this so far. Agree about the comments about the font sizes (have only reviewed on a desktop). I also don’t like that new content isn’t easy to find. If I check this several times a day I’ll need to search the entire site to find updates. I already miss Blog Central (I still miss the blog previews so you could read each blog entry without clicking through). I used to come to Macleans and barely need to click, and now all the navigation is killing the experience and enjoyment of the content.

Wow.. okay, my comments on the new site layout itself will have to wait, you’ve got bigger concerns, and they’re with the sign-up system.

You don’t actually need my name. You don’t use it for a user ID, and you get no verification that it actually is what I’ve entered which means the only thing your’e going to use it for is to sell to spammers. Thanks, but no. Sell the name I’ve given to spammers and I’ll know who the hell you’re selling your user lists to.

Also, when your servers get hacked (and given the level of tech sophistication I’ve seen combined with your willingness to whore yourselves out to even the most obtrusive advertisement schemes, it really is only a question of when) I don’t need people having my name, birthday, postal code, and gender all conveniently stored in one place. That’s enough information to get a fake ID out of. So kill either the postal code or the gender.

And on that, my gender is none of your GD business either unless you’re planning on sleeping with me. Are you? No? Then you don’t need that bit of info. But if you’re going to include the question, then you might want to at least consider that many people don’t identify as either of the normal two genders these days.

Also, if you’re going to ask a Canadian for a postal code, you might want to remember that Canadian postal codes have this little invention in them called a “space”. If you’re not going to take the space in a Canadian postal code, then you NEED to give an error message that explains the problem. Otherwise, even the poor folk who feel it’s okay to put their real information in are going to be stymied.

This brings us to the actual site.

Do you really think that the people who provide the bulk of your views really care who the author is? I mean other than to try to avoid giving Cosh articles any advertising revenue? I certainly don’t. Nor do I care what “section” it’s in. I want to be able to hop on the site, easily see what’s the newest stuff I haven’t seen yet, go into the articles that look interesting, and skip the others. I’m definitely NOT going to be going into each individual author to see if they’ve done anything new.

I see you say you’ll be promoting “all the latest work”, but what, exactly, does that include? What’s the time frame for “latest?”

The comments made already about the crazy amount of white space and font differences between article and comments are all valid. I’m using Opera as my browser, which means that Chrome users will likely see pretty much the same thing.

Also, as yet, I haven’t received a reply, but I’ll be quite surprised if I receive any sort of notification when I do. And no, I do not want email notifications of replies, I would like an area where I can quickly go in, see if I’ve been responded to anywhere, and quickly get to to post replies. Perhaps you have this, but given that the account options up top are “edit account” or “sign out”, I doubt it.

Put all of this together and what we have here is a site that’s easier to look at on tablets, but harder to interact with in any format. You don’t want this, as the interaction is what brings repeat visitors which contributes to your advertising impressions stats.

On the bright side.. I expect I’ll have more time to be productive now.

I agree with all that Thwim. I’ve given them fake ID, a random postal code, and the wrong gender.

Also way too much hunting….and as to interaction, we’ll see if you get notice of my comment.

The only thing I disliked about Discus was that perfectly ordinary comments ….no profanity, no obscenities, nothing even radical…..would be eliminated [with no explanation so everyone thought it was something horrible]…..and yet I’ve seen the ‘N-word’ used openly, and the most racist vile sexist remarks pass unnoticed. Even if they were flagged!

All they needed was someone to whip through the comments maybe once or twice a day for any bad language etc. Instead we got this sterile, antiseptic…..I dunno, Globe and Mail version of comments.

That has both good and bad points. On the good side, it means that people know exactly what any responses are for. On the bad side, it means when we come across additional information, it adds another post to the database. Case in point, this very message about a lack of editing features.

Also, I realized that what you said about featuring “all the latest” might mean that you’ve got them all sectioned up.. so if I want to see the latest politics, I have to go into the politics section. If I then want to see the latest economics, I have to go into the economics section, and so on. That’s a far cry different from just having an area where we can go into and see what all the “latest” stuff is.

Thanks for the follow-up, Thwim. to clarify that earlier message, what I meant was that the front page of macleans.ca will still be used to highlight our new (and notable) content, as it was previously. But your point on the latest content is fair. As mentioned, this is a work in progress, and all feedback will be taken into account, including the comments in this thread.

So what are you doing, Beta testing a new website design? Anything being opened to the public should not be a “work in progress”. You have a database of frequent commenters, of long-term subscribers. Farm the website out to them for comments. Pay them a few bucks or free subscription to get feed back. Then introduce the final product. I’m sick to death of poorly designed software and sites designed by people who think it’s cool or logical but crap to use or look at. I think it’s called ergonomics. You’ve put the cart before the horse.

Case in point: I’m looking at a response box using an 8 point or so font in a one inch text box. I cannot see more than 4 lines of my comment, I have to scroll, meaning I have to leave the keyboard to use the mouse. Yet I’m looking at over 4 inches of vertical white space with absolutely nothing on it.

Oh yeah, where’s the edit function, how did I manage to get a double space.

Selena61 on March 6, 2014 at 6:28 pm

Okay, so it’s a week since all this feedback was posted, and nothing has been improved. Do you want interaction between audience members or not? Do the authors want fans who follow their articles or not? Do you need clickthrough rates to measure ads or not?

I also don’t like that, when I signed it to comment, it booted me back to the beginning of the article and I had to find my way back.

And the reply box is way too small; can only read three lines at a time – including blank lines if I double-space between paras. Makes it a lot harder to proof-read (can comments be edited once posted?)

I expect I’ll be spending much less time on this site now (which means a lot fewer of the all-important click-throughs your advertisers will want).

Thwim, I don’t know your gender, and I don’t necessarily want to sleep with you but I think I love you all the same. Great post, thoughtful feedback, and I really hope they listen because I will miss talking back and forth with smart people here, including yourself, lgarvin, pickngrin, phil king, and all the rest. Over the years, I have come to really enjoy the smart ideas you share. This was the best news comment site in Canada up until this redesign — and they aren’t promoting new articles, and every time I FIND one from Wherry, I get a 404 error message. It’s un-navigable — and I want blog central back (and I also kick myself when I accidently click on articles by the loathsome Cosh. Shuddery kind of fellow.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much agreement on a Macleans blog. You can add my agreement to all the comments I’ve read. It would have been much easier to simply give a arrow up to some of them … or is that somewhere on this site. I’ll have to look harder.

Don’t know what to think yet, but judging by some of the comments you haven’t knocked the ball out of the park. I’m a little concerned by claims that profiles might be vulnerable to being hacked given the prevalence of ID theft nowadays, since i’m one of the naive saps who’s registered with legit info; can you offer assurances this is a remote likelihood? [ oh and you might want to tell the letters section that i incorrectly sent my complaint to, before realizeing i couldn’t get in via disqus, that i’m sorry]
I’m not as negative as some, as long as the content remains high, which i’m sure it will be. But i have to pile on a bit over the comment sections that now appear far less interactive,cozy and chatty. lack of an edit feature is certainly going to cramp my style, but perhaps weed out some of the illiterates. However, there really wasn’t much wrong with disqus. At a minimum i hope you will consider adding an edit feature. And it looks like the one thing i had hoped this change up would accomplish – weed out the worst of the trolls and those who post under multiple ids, will not happen, sadly.

I suppose this format will take some getting used to. At least they saw fit to maintain a comments section. CBC has been increasingly forgoing allowing comments on their news site.
One suggestion. Could the comment font size be increased? It’s comparably smaller than the rest of the page.

On another note, I like how my old avatar suddenly makes its reappearance, without me having to do anything, even though this is a new account. I always liked this picture of me. My teeth were so much whiter back then.

Well I see I am in the minority but I like it. First because I get to sign up and use my name (discus wouldn’t let me), and second because this works so much better on my smart phone. It is easier to see (I like the font size, because not everyone has good eyesight…), and the comment section actually works. I could rarely use discus on my smart phone as it just would not load.

That all said, I did prefer the way the articles were listed on the old site.

Well, aside from all the things that others have pointed out (and my latest comments upthread) there’s the fact that when I reach the end of one page of comments and click “next” I end up at he bottom of the next page and have to scroll back up in order to continue.

I just discovered one feature that addresses a concern I – and others – raised earlier – the comments box can be made bigger by dragging the little triangle in the lower right corner of the text box. At least that allows me to read my full comment rather than just a few lines.

Thwim in particular covered the bulk of my complaints. I really hate having to track down individual writer or go from topic to topic to see new features. Hate pretty much everything about the comments section – waaaaay too much functionality lost, and no ability to vote up or down others’ comments.

If your goal was to drive the regulars away, you likely have wildly succeeded. Otherwise, as I said above, epic fail. I’ll check back in a month or two to see if you have come to your senses.

Hey Lindsey: Came back for a visit and tried to post a comment on one of the stories – it disappeared into the ether. Not impressed!!!

Also, I notice a distinct lack of comments generally on the stories I visited. Looks like you have driven the regulars away, as I predicted. Congrats!

KeithBram on March 12, 2014 at 1:40 pm

Hi Keith – thanks for the heads-up. Can you let us know what happened when you went to post the comment, specifically? Did the screen just refresh with your comment missing? (If it happens again and you’re able to take a screencap, we can investigate this further – obviously we don’t want comments disappearing. In the meantime, I’ll flag this.)

Lindsey Wiebe on March 12, 2014 at 5:39 pm

No idea if this the right place to reply…but sadly i have to agree with your comments Keith. In one fell swoop macleans seems to have killed off the regulars. Perhaps they didn’t care, but given the difficulty of tracking down all the stories i’m not sure is i’ll make the effort to stick around at all. Check in to see what Wells or AW is up to and that’s it. In fact it’s easier to get to their stuff by checking their twitter feed and not coming to macleans at all. Sorry macleans but this almost like a goddamn Greek tragedy, or like one of those asteroids hitting out of the blue. You’ve wiped out a 90% of life on planet macleans…what have you done you silly people? This place used to be so great. You’ve driven me to seriously consider going to twitter…just watch out Canada if that happens that’s all i have to say.

Wow, you have a tough job. Macleans is actually my favorite online newspaper. I’m sure most Canadians think of it as a magazine but I read you everyday. If the Economist can call itself a newspaper, so can Macleans. I never see the print edition because I live in the Netherlands.

I loved the old format probably because I was very familiar with it. I know that change must happen and that something like this was inevitable. That said, there are a few issues that will have to be sorted before I’m going to pay for this…

On a 24″ HDMI desktop system, it helps to roll the chair back about 8 feet because the default font-size is so damn big. So I hit ctrl – 3 times to shrink it.

Then, to read the comments, which are sometimes better than the article, I have to reverse the process (ctrl+ 3 or 4 times). I know enough about these things to know that this is easily corrected At least this should be easy.The next part will be more difficult but certainly not impossible.

I admire your courage to abandon the ubiquitous Disqus. There is nothing wrong with managing your own membership (just ask Stephen Harper) and, to be frank, I don’t really trust Disqus to protect my privacy either. That said, you do ask for too much information and the membership form is flawed. I do trust Macleans more at this point than Disqus, but you are going to have to prove yourselves now.

And you have to implement some form of voting and editing on comments. And html tags. If EmilyOne and BillyBob get into a Batshit Crazy Troll match in a Cage, I want to be able to COLLAPSE that thread like any other whacko 9/11 conspiracy theory.

Disqus offers Voting and the option of sorting. Make it so.

Signing off now. Keeping a copy before I hit post. My first comment went to that Big BitBucket in the Sky. I hate it when that happens.

While I like the new layout, the use of HUGE fonts (17 and 22 pt) really makes it quite laborious to read on a mobile or tablet screen, which is smaller. My wrist is actually sore and cramped from scrolling after just a couple of hours of reading. If your publication was Senior’s Living, and the majority of your readers had cataracts, I might see the reasoning. Please use a reasonable point size, 8 – 10 pt is best. To my knowledge, no other publications use such huge point sizes.

Major work is needed, this redesign was not mature enough to roll out.

One question: It is Thursday March 13 and I can’t seem to see any articles in QP Live or from Aaron Wherry since last week . . . . is it supposed to be like that?

PS, I think someone mentioned already, but it would be much better if the ‘icon’ for each story included its posting date; and in the story itself put the date at the top. Really, it is ridiculous that you would need readers to point that out.

A total violation of Rule #1 in design: let form follow function.
I have been trying to navigate this for the better part of a week just to read something. It is clumsy, inelegant, over-layered, too self-conscious, misleading, and all sizzle, no steak. I wiish you all a very happy decade without me.

…and, to be clear, let me give some details.
a. You implemented this one week before announcing that you were implementing it. If you did announnce it, it must have been in some very discreet corner. The rule is, announce it 2 weeks in advance. At first I thought you’d been hit by a Trojan.

b. The band of animated teasers defeats all desire to actually read them. They are a slideshow, not a magazine element. ‘This is a designer’s private fantasy, self-defeating. Are you the Disney Channel or are you a magazine?

c. None of this, not a single piece of your new puzzle, has been cross-tessted for platforms. Parts don’t work on small devices; parts don’t work on laptop computers. What are you trying to do?

d. The comments section I am typing into, on laptop, appears in 6-pt Mouseprint. Is your readership in the 12-yr-old demographic? If so, congrats on the generational breakthrough.

e. This same section is gaudy, oversophisticated, and visually clumsy. You’ve got a fashion statement here, not a design. Comments section design is now a convention, and, in that convention, form follows function. Function involves a few essentiels. Essentiels follow not the need to make it pretty, but to make it sequential and logical. Hierarchy and chronology are the only design imperatives. Also, you’ve omitted an edit fuction. Why? Here I am, typing up 6-pt mouseprint and I won’t have a chance to edit my work. This is even more fun than it sounds, because the text window is tiny so it all quickly disappears.

All feedback noted and appreciated, avanti. For c), if you could be more specific on what’s not working on small devices/laptops, I’ll pass that along. (The comment concerns have already been flagged, but I’ll make sure your comments are included as well.)

It is, in my opinion, impossible to design ONE interface that will work on laptop as well as a mobile phone. That’s probably a waste of effort, because you will inevitably throw 90% of the “technical” stuff out. I quickly viewed it on a tablet and did not take notes. I only remember impressons.
A 30-min session using 4 differet platforms will answer your access questions.

The laptop experience may in fact be the least successful, and not just for the mouseprint.
First, laptops load the thumbnail gallery, which the reader does find interesting and is ready to click on… when suddenly it all disappears under a slide show, which itself is unfriendly, because, as soon as you’re interested (or when you’ve finaly finished ‘reading headline and graphc’, it moves out f frame’ and, since it fills the frame, you haven’t even got a reminder of what you were just tempted by — it’s a ‘picture’, not a movie frame. This is all wrong.

Suggestion : Write the basic narrative of how each typical user “sees,” “understands,” “chooses,” then finally “reads” the content they wish to access. Write it for 4 typical platforms, taking into consideration maximum and minimum complexities. Implement the basic functionality of that. Get people to try it out. Then, you may experiment with design — as long as you don’t remove the stuff people have told you works. But one this is certain: the slide show at the top must go. You’ve taken the word “teaser” literally and that makes people mad.

In terms of constructive criticism I strongly dislike the “teaser” bar. In an ideal world it wouldn’t exist at all. In a less than ideal world it wouldn’t have the timed transition from image to image. If you insist on keeping the transition at least make the caption appear as soon as the image does.

As far as comments go, you appear to have killed whatever online community there was stone dead. If this was one of your goals, congratulations!

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